


I Don't Know How Long I Have Been Here

by Laetitia_Laetitii



Series: Aileen Westbrook [13]
Category: Runescape
Genre: Alternative Timeline, F/M, Gen, Kindred Spirits, World Guardian - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-10 12:43:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6985687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laetitia_Laetitii/pseuds/Laetitia_Laetitii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alternative timeline. At the end of Kindred Spirits, something goes differently. This takes place a while afterwards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Don't Know How Long I Have Been Here

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for mental torture and a sex scene involving a character under the age of eighteen. Aileen was seventeen at the time of her marriage (and thus during the scene), Stígandr was twenty-six.

 

I don’t know how long I have been here.

I don’t know where I am either. Or to rephrase it, I don’t know what he has contained me in.

It’s hard to describe my present state. I have no eyes to see, no ears to hear, no skin to feel with. I neither move nor breathe nor sleep. Yet I am conscious, even if the only thing I am conscious of is my own existence.

He leaves me alone for the longest times, and during those absences I fear and yearn for his return. You see, the only time when I feel or sense anything anymore is when he plays with me.

I don’t have another word for it.

He talks to me. I don’t know how, but he tells me things. One of the first things he told me was that the rest of the hostages were dead. He had them killed, and sent their souls to join the brothers under the Barrows. Linza’s downfall was her own doing. The other three, as he keeps reminding me, were only bait. Why? I try to ask. Why them? He never replies. I don’t know if he can hear me.

            He has not yet destroyed my body, he says. For now, he’s happy to dress it up and let it strike poses, or else have it perform manual chores around the dungeons. Its first task, of course, was killing the hostages.

            One day he might put me back in it, he told me a while ago. What condition it will be in, however, is another story. Do I really need all my limbs? Do I need my eyes? Would it be so bad to have my face disfigured? In a cabinet in his laboratory, he tells me, is a locked box of enchanted vials. Dormant in those vials are stored pathogens that cause slow-progressing diseases. Why should he not have my body fetch it and sample a few of them? There is no need for me to answer, he says. It is all up to him to decide, as is everything else.

            After that, he left me for a very long time.

            When he finally came back –and how grateful I was that he did –he seemed to have done some thinking. Perhaps he should leave my body as it was, he said, and instead excise my memories? Take them one by one, until nothing but an empty consciousness was left? Would I feel it? Would I miss what he had taken? After all, I had taken one of _his_ memories. He had seen it when sieving through my mind, me poking around like a thief with that clever device Kharshai made.

            For now he leaves my memories where they are, and contents himself with forcing me to relive them. Sometimes he goes through them systematically, looking for new information, commenting on interesting points. Other times, perhaps when he feels bored, he’ll dig up the ones he must know by heart. He makes me slide from scene to scene, in a loop, on repeat, and turns my soul into a music box of vivid dreams.

He has me stand on the roof of the chapel in the Wilderness, and watch as Lucien raises the staff high above his head. I can see the smallest things. I can see every star in the sky, every flake of ash in the air where my friends stood.

He makes me walk under Naragun’s dying sun, up in the tree-tops where the cold wind carries the stench of the dead. I follow Guthix across the desolation, until we come to the ruined stone cottage. Those final few seconds fascinate my captor, and he forces me recall them time and again. He wants to watch as I receive my gift. Is he looking for something?

He takes me first to the Hollows under the Myre and then to the roof of castle Drakan. Smoke. The smell of predators. When he digs deeper into my memories of Morytania, he finds Maria Gadderanks. He watches as I taunt her. He watches as I describe her husband’s death to her. And because he knows what I know, he knows I enjoyed it.

He takes me back to Ardougne, where I have just quit Cromperty’s service. At the Flying Horse Inn a hooded stranger sits down next to me. The stranger knows I’ve been running runes at the Ourania altar. He commends my stealth. He commends my courage. In fact, he’s looking for someone with my talents. (The chapel roof. Ash in the wind. A cave on Lunar Isle, where I bind a man’s wounds. An island off the coast of Kandarin, where an ancient gnome tells me about a silver tree who was his friend. Chapel roof. Stranger. Chapel roof, where Lucien’s spell has knocked me on my back. Snowflakes land on my face and melt, and I can taste my own blood.)

Blood. In an alley in the Meiyerditch ghetto, a vyrewatch has me pinned against a rotting wall. Time slows down as its mouth works against my jugular, and from a distance I can feel my legs grow weak beneath me. I don’t know if it’s the blood loss or the shock, but I know I can’t stand up for one more second. My hands find the creature’s shoulders, and I hold on for dear life as it feeds on me, panting, knees shaking, and the whole act turns into a grotesque parody of–

…I’m in Rellekka. The embers in the fire pit give little light, and I can’t see Stían’s face as he takes off my bridal crown. In the dark he becomes a stranger, some great and terrifying animal, all hot breath and scratching beard and claws. Disembodied hands run up and down my sides, calming, soothing, and I don’t know if I want it more than I want it to be over. Then he’s pushing up my spread legs, and something brushes between my thighs, something hard and smooth and twitching with a life of its own. He settles into a rhythm, rubbing against my exposed flesh, and I feel like I’m floating in warm water, choking, my breath coming in short hitches. When he finally enters me, I’m not thinking about pleasure or pain or the alien sensation of something penetrating me. There is one thought in my head, coherent and clear: _“This is what you wanted. This is what you exchanged your family for.”_

It is two years later, and I’m running as fast as my state will allow me. My hands are downy from the chicken I was plucking when Auda barged in through the gate uninvited, crying my name.

 _“Ailín! Ailín! It’s Stígandr!”_ Then we are at the town gate, and two men are carrying him in on a makeshift stretcher. A cape covers his midriff from prying eyes, but it’s already soaked a dark red, and I know enough from that. His lips are white. His eyes stare unseeing, and I don’t know if he can hear me scream his name. And then–

I’m lying in bed, and my whole body hurts. Through the stupor I see the face of Vigdís, as she slowly explains what has happened. I lost it. _But it was almost time!_ It was stillborn, she says, and I have lost a lot of blood. She presses a cup against my lips, and I taste the bitter herbs that bring sleep. Rest, she tells me, rest now.

The funeral boat catches fire, and I watch as it drifts out to the sea, the flames rising against     the night sky.

Dark fire bursts from the staff, and it’s all over in seconds.

Guthix throws his head back, and his cry echoes in the unfathomable depths of the cave.

The last thing I see is the hungry look on Sliske’s face, and then I see nothing because I’m floating away.

 I can smell the smoke.

I can smell the ash in the wind.

I can smell my own blood.

And then he’s gone, and I can smell nothing again. I can feel nothing again. My memories are not quite as lively when I mull through them on my own – I need to be made to recall them, without the chance to look away. I thinks he knows this.

Until he comes back, there is nothing for me to do. I continue to exist, immobile, unperceiving. I’ll wait for his return, and imagine that I can experience fear and longing. I’m starting to forget how emotions feel. But he’ll come back eventually, of that I’m certain. He’ll come back for me.


End file.
